rfmcdonald | [FORUM] Do you think the future going to get worse before/as it gets better? (Reply)

The io9 transcript of writer John Shirley 's TED lecture is something I've been thinking about recently. His contention is that things will get better but they'll get worse first--or, perhaps more accurately, that it will get complicated, with a trend of ultimately empowering technological development being substantially countered being substantially countered in the short and medium term by environmental collapse and difficulties in adjusting to new technologies.

[A]ll technological convergences, revolutions, renaissances, taking place in the next fifty years will happen against the backdrop of social and environmental crises. Multiple simultaneous crises will create shortages, which will further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, schisming the world, separating most of the world from the breakthroughs of "singularity" level tech and biotech — this could result in a powerful and eccentric technocrat class with its own elitist rationale for dominance of the technologically under privileged through control of media and mechanism. Generally, the moneyed class will be the technologically equipped class — and with some exceptions the disenfranchised financially will be the disenfranchised technologically, despite the cell phones we see now in many remote villages.

Let me be clear that I do not foresee the downfall of civilization, I do not expect my sons to have to emulate the Mel Gibson character in Road Warrior.

But it's going to be a long slog.

Not only global warming, but pollution, ecological change generally, and the impact of these massive shifts on individual human beings and human cultures generally, will inflict serious harm on people who can't cope. For those who can cope, cornucopia will be made readily available.

[T]he privileged will have access to fantastic augmentation. Recently nanoengineers at Princeton have developed a superthin electronic skin, that puckers and stretches like real skin: it can be adhered invisibly to your forehead; it could be hidden in the throat and used for subvocal communication. More sophisticated iterations will be able to communicate with the internet, with other people at a distance, constantly transmitting and receiving data — this kind of extreme interactivity will make some cyborgian dreams come true.

The tech-elite will have access to electronic resources and protected food stocks — some will be synthesized, with fresher foods raised in high-security agricultural skyrises (now planned, they're towering, high tech greenhouses). Feeling threatened by the instability of the rest of the world, technocrats will naturally coalesce defensively against those migrating to seek better conditions. Moneyed, technologically sophisticated elements of society will tend to withdraw from the increasing pressures of the masses of disenfranchised, into the safety of walled, highly protected enclaves, which will be in effect, if not in legal status, technocratic city states.

Some of this semisuperhuman cyborgian elite will obsess about managing an unmanageable world — and they will come up with some solutions. But other privileged technocrats may well sink into the repellently self indulgent decadence of virtual reality retreats, where they'll be sequestered physically and mentally both. Addiction to social media, videogames, cell phones and the internet is now a recognized phenomena and that has implications for our relationship to future tech. Because its addictive capacity will only increase as its experiential quality improves.

This negative quality of technology, potentially enabling even sociopathy, will be a major ongoing issue, especially in the context of the social issues he describes.

Shirley's conclusion?

There will be catastrophe between here... and there. I believe that catastrophe will spur social transformation. I'm optimistic for the long term... because everything will be terrible in the short term. We'll have astounding technological advancement against a backdrop of grievous social inequity and quite possibly increasing barbarity, for a period, until we are forced by waves of crises to come to terms with the consequences of developing a civilization blindly. Wars, plagues, radical separation of privileges, famines due to climate change and other environmental consequences, will force humanity to reassess, simply to survive, and accept Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship Earth" concept as very real.

I'm not very skeptical of this image, for whatever it's worth; it sounds plausible, but I can imagine counterarguments. I'm just not that convinced by many of them right now.

And you?